About the Speaker
Gillen D’Arcy Wood is Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he serves as Associate Director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), and directs the Environmental Writing Program. His work, in its “eco-historical” mode, performs cultural archaeology across multiple spatial and temporal scales – from volcanic catastrophes to paleoclimatic archives buried in polar ice – and between disciplines from literary history to the Earth and atmospheric sciences. His prizewinning 2014 book, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton 2014) has been widely influential in ecocriticism and climate studies, and was recognized in Book of the Year awards by the Guardian, the London Times, and the American Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. His most recent book, Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of its Ice (Princeton 2020), reconstructs the Victorian-era South Polar expeditions as an original encounter with a precariously glaciated Earth and climate change. His new research project, which marries Big Data with historiographic narrative, focuses on our deteriorating oceans and the Victorian origins of marine science in the expedition of HMS Challenger.
Host: Leon Liebenberg
